Hiding Bear Posted July 14, 2004 Author Report Share Posted July 14, 2004 (Baghdad, Iraq-AP, July 14, 2004 Updated 12:15 PM ) _ Insurgents are again targeting Iraqi government officials. A government source says militants killed the governor of the northern city of Mosul as his convoy was traveling to Baghdad today. It's not clear how the governor, Youssef Kashmola, was killed. Authorities also say gunmen killed an auditor for Iraq's Industry Ministry in a drive-by shooting in Baghdad. The man had been leaving his office yesterday when he was gunned down. Silver starting to shine! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brian4 Posted July 14, 2004 Report Share Posted July 14, 2004 If anyone is long here-I would bail in the next 20 minutes. keep your helmets on!. Cuz then a window opens that runs to 2.30 EST and it is a real MEAN Mother! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
orvack Posted July 14, 2004 Report Share Posted July 14, 2004 The "coming generational storm" should get young people's attention when they realize the consequences of not voting. Politics will take care of them, that's for sure.... interesting, the not-very-financially-oriented Village Voice has been running a series of articles under the banner of "Generation Debt", and health care costs are the topic of the current one: One Sick Fall With health insurance out of reach, a generation braces itself for the worst July 13th, 2004 11:30 AM If they're not outright poor as a class, young adults in this country are at least very, very broke. The average collegian graduates with more than $20,000 in debt, headed for a job market where real hourly wages have kept pace with neither inflation nor the cost of living. Young adults are broke in part because of their unprecedented schooling?in the latest census figures, 28 percent of those between 25 and 29 reported holding a bachelor's degree?which promised to pluck them away from the constellation of problems plaguing America's underclass, whether it was trouble with housing or inadequate medical care. Thanks for the link. Check out Russell from last night : "Will unfunded liabilities ultimately bring on American's worst depression? It certainly wouldn't surprise me. Business Week this week runs a cover story in which it talks about US Corporations having built up almost a trillion dollars in unfunded pension liabilities. This is "killing" many of the older companies, who have built huge pension and medical liabilities. The low interest rates of the last few years have also hurt the pension and medical funds (for instance, think Ford, GM and the big airlines). These corporations are now facing stiff competition from new companies who do not have to deal with these liabilities. But corporate unfunded liabilities are a drop in the bucket compared with US government's unfunded liabilities, which add up to around $45 trillion. Two books discuss this momentous issue. "The Coming Generational Storm, what you need to know about America's economic future," by Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns. Peter Peterson addresses the government's horrendous unfunded liabilities in his book, "Running On Empty." The sub-title of the book is "How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future, and What Americans Can Do About it." Of course, we won't do much of anything about it -- until the problem hits us square in the face. There are only two solutions. One is to cut way back on Social Security and Medicare or somehow privatize them. The second solution is to print the money needed to cover these liabilities, and of course this would be wildly, and I mean WILDLY, inflationary. If this is the path we go on, the dollar would collapse, sending US interest rates through the roof -- while at the same time the economy would unravel. As I see it, the unfunded liabilities present the basis for the next depression. I think the whole monetary system could ultimately break down in the face of this ocean of unfunded liabilities. Wait, there's such a thing as "starting all over again," and I believe there's a good chance that that's exactly what we'd have to do. Fantastic as it sounds, we might have to dump the entire current system, get rid of the Federal Reserve, and go back to what the US Constitution originally mandated. The US government would issue the money that it needs, the dollar would be backed with a specified percentage of gold, and the idea of a private central bank (the Fed) that can issue any quantity of money it wants -- would be relegated to history. OK, honestly, I don't know how it will all work out. I do know that the US has built up massive unfunded liabilities. I do know that when you set up systems that are not funded, ultimately you either have to print the money to fund the system, change the system, or jettison the system entirely. But there's one thing that's certain -- any one of the three will entail pain -- a lot of pain. The last two generations of Americans (people up to their mid-40s) are the only generations in US history that have never had to deal with true hard times. This length of painless era has never happened before. And I don't think most Americans say 45 or younger, can even envision what hard times are like." www.dowtheoryletters.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted July 14, 2004 Report Share Posted July 14, 2004 The Benefits issue is the 800 pound gorilla in the room. My time in Michigan included a trip across the state along the corridor from Grand Rapids to Detroit and back. Everything there is dependent on the auto industry...including the huge population of retirees who are dependent upon their pension checks from Ford and GM. My Grandfather lost his farm in the depression and left his family behind and thumbed a ride from north Western Michigan down to Lansing with nothing more than the clothes on his back. He got a job at MotorWheel, a division of GM, and eventually returned to bring his family to settle there. My father has divorced and remarried a career GM employee (retired) and they are living pretty well off of her pension, which includes a $4 co-pay for virtually all perscription drugs. I asked where they would be if GM declared bankruptcy, and the answer was not pretty. As evidenced by United's recent moves, corporate CEO's are lining up to take their companies into bankruptcy, dump the pension obligations on the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp. (a misnomer if there ever was one), and come back out to compete without the anchor of their moral and ethical obligations of those on whose backs their companies were built. For years we marveled as powerful unions jammed ever more costly contracts down the throats of the suits running the show. I can't count the number of times that I proclaimed that a $35 per hour widget handler on an assembly line was a perscription for disaster down the road. Well, here we are...down the road. Check this out: Today experts can think of no major company that has instituted guaranteed pensions in the past decade. In 1999, IBM, which has old-style benefits and contributed almost $4 billion to shore up its pension plans in 2002, did a study of its competitors and found 75% did not offer a pension plan and fewer still paid for retiree health care. Despite the stampede to defined-contribution plans, there are still 44 million Americans covered by old-fashioned pensions that promise a set payout at retirement. All told, they're owed more than $1 trillion by 30,000 different companies. The government bailout fund is $9.7 billion in the red, and Social Security and personal savings are hardly going to be enough. The cost of honoring PBGC's commitments could be higher than anyone is expecting. The government bailout fund has relied on having enough healthy companies to pony up premiums to cover plans that fail. But in a scenario of rising plan terminations, healthy companies with strong plans still in the PBGC system would be asked to pay more. For corporations already fretting that pensions have become a competitive liability and a turnoff to investors, this could be the tipping point. Faced with higher insurance costs, they could opt out, rapidly accelerating the system's decline as the remaining healthy participants become overwhelmed by the needy. In the end, the problem would land with Congress, which could be forced to undertake a savings-and-loan-type bailout. It's almost too painful to think about, and so no one does. Most worrisome is the record number of pension plans in danger of going under. According to the PBGC, as of September, 2003, there was at least $86 billion in pension obligations promised by companies deemed financially weak. That's up from $35 billion the year before. And it's on top of a record number of companies that managed to dump their troubled pension plans on the PBGC last year: 152. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/conte...92001_mz001.htm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
machinehead Posted July 14, 2004 Report Share Posted July 14, 2004 Silver up 3% SOX down 4% Money earns. Paper burns. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted July 14, 2004 Report Share Posted July 14, 2004 I love it... Pissonme was just yacking on CNBS saying: "The bulls remain optimistic here as the markets remain strong despite the bad news out of Intel" As he was speaking the market fell off a cliff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted July 14, 2004 Report Share Posted July 14, 2004 Silver up 3%SOX down 4% Money earns. Paper burns. Silver at 6.55 Screw the government and screw the matrix. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
longOnUranus Posted July 14, 2004 Report Share Posted July 14, 2004 On vacation this week, was pleasantly suprised to see they bought the market on INTC's broken back..added a couple SEP SPX puts..."one small step for man, one giant cluster**ck straight ahead for mankind" - Neil "Shorty" Armstrong Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
machinehead Posted July 14, 2004 Report Share Posted July 14, 2004 Big day for the CRB index, too. 273.29 +3.14 (delayed quote) While INTC flounders, commods and metals embark on a stealth rally. The stock market is just a sideshow, until they pull the plug on it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
soup Posted July 14, 2004 Report Share Posted July 14, 2004 As I posted this a.m., was pretty sure the option mkt was telling me this rally was not going to last. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brian4 Posted July 14, 2004 Report Share Posted July 14, 2004 my stop is 1121- we gonna pick up steam to the downside shortly! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hiding Bear Posted July 14, 2004 Author Report Share Posted July 14, 2004 Silver up 3%SOX down 4% Money earns. Paper burns. Silver at 6.55 Screw the government and screw the matrix. Silver +0.20 Burn the Fed, burn the COMEX! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The End Posted July 14, 2004 Report Share Posted July 14, 2004 VLCCF and NAT are soaring back after hitting their 50 dma's. Thank goodness. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trinharder Posted July 14, 2004 Report Share Posted July 14, 2004 Fed: the Fed came in and bought $1.898 bln of coupons (Aug '04 to Jun '05) from the market. The operation is purely technical and reduces the size of the daily Fed RPs Fannie sold $7 bln 3-month bills at a stop-out rate of 1.480%, $3 bln 6-months at a 1.750% stop-out and $1 bln 1-years at a 2.105% stop out Freddie sold $3 bln 10-year reference notes priced to yield 5.041%, 30% of the offering went to Asia, a record participation level on a new Freddie 10-year (Reuters) Notice that last part? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hiding Bear Posted July 14, 2004 Author Report Share Posted July 14, 2004 Fed: the Fed came in and bought $1.898 bln of coupons (Aug '04 to Jun '05) from the market. The operation is purely technical and reduces the size of the daily Fed RPs Fannie sold $7 bln 3-month bills at a stop-out rate of 1.480%, $3 bln 6-months at a 1.750% stop-out and $1 bln 1-years at a 2.105% stop out Freddie sold $3 bln 10-year reference notes priced to yield 5.041%, 30% of the offering went to Asia, a record participation level on a new Freddie 10-year (Reuters) Notice that last part? Tanks trinharder. I knew they were up to something when the web site went down. However, like I said yesterday, the Fed is engineering a sleath expansion of the monetary base for maybe a few weeks or so now. Great calls B$4! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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